A Brief Festival Celebrates Solo Piano for the Untimid

A Brief Festival Celebrates Solo Piano for the Untimid

By ALLAN KOZINN

Published: November 9, 2006

Last year Joseph Rubenstein, a pianist and composer devoted to new music, assembled a few like-minded colleagues for the first Key to the Future festival, a pair of concerts in which recent piano music held the spotlight. It might be a triumph of hope over circumstance to call two concerts a festival, but Mr. Rubenstein seems determined to let his project grow into the description. This year he is offering three concerts at the Greenwich House Music School.

Mr. Rubenstein opened the first concert on Tuesday evening with eight aphoristic works by Howard Skempton, couched in the dominant current style, which is to say, a style-agnostic eclecticism. Several of the vignettes — “The Keel Row” and “The Cockfight” (both from 1989), for example — are texturally and harmonically stripped down and make a simple, direct appeal.

But the best of these pieces were memorials to John Cage and Morton Feldman. “Late” (1992) touches on the mercurial Cage spirit, just as the spare, sustained tones of “Toccata” (1987) evoke Mr. Feldman’s insistence on patience as a musical virtue. Mr. Rubenstein returned in the second part of the program to give an arresting account of “Let Down,” one of Christopher O’Riley’s arrangements of Radiohead songs.

Lisa Moore played a more rugged set, starting with Leo Ornstein’s meditative, steamy and occasionally sparkling “Solitude” (1978). Henri Dutilleux’s “Jeu des Contraires” (1989) takes its title seriously: delicacy mingles with brusqueness, and fleetness is offset by chordal steadiness. Ms. Moore’s energy was illuminating, particularly in the sharp-edged staccato bursts near the work’s end. She closed her part of the program with Bruce Stark’s “Ode to ‘Ode to Joy’ ” (1997), a fantasy on the theme from the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, couched in jazzy rhythms, rumbling bass figures and a healthy measure of overt virtuosity. It was as if Liszt, while musing on the Beethoven work, were suddenly possessed by the spirit of Art Tatum.

Blair McMillen closed the concert with a powerhouse account of Fred Hersch’s “24 Variations on a Bach Chorale” (2002). Using “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunder” from the “St. Matthew Passion” as his theme, Mr. Hersch summons all the classic variation moves: there’s a pointillistic variation, a couple in minor keys, several lyrical flights and Schumannesque character pieces, intensely chromatic variations and a grand Romantic thundering finale. The chorale tune readily sustains all that.

The concluding performances of the Keys to the Future piano festival are tonight at 8 at Greenwich House Music School, 46 Barrow Street, Greenwich Village; (212) 242-4770.